Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [341]
Emboldened, Capra hit the promotional trail, knowing that neither Tracy nor Hepburn could be counted upon to give the picture much in the way of support. Yet, when the film opened at Radio City on April 22, it was the two principal stars who garnered the lion’s share of the press, Bosley Crowther finding Tracy “a much more attractive-looking candidate than anyone who has yet declared” and Kate giving “every assurance of making the most stylish First Lady we’ve had in years.” Warmly greeted in nearly all critical corners, the movie performed well at the box office, though not quite up to expectations and nowhere near the record run of I Remember Mama, which had just preceded it at the Music Hall.
With topicality as its primary selling point, State of the Union played off quickly, posting domestic rentals in the range of $3.5 million—not bad, but lower than for Cass Timberlane, which demonstrated much greater appeal among women and had the added help of a best-selling book as its basis. It disappeared by the end of the year, never to be reissued nor widely shown on television.
Decades later, when Ronald Reagan exceeded his allotted time at a New Hampshire debate, the moderator ordered his microphone cut off. “I paid for this microphone!” Reagan famously stormed in protest. So obscure by then was State of the Union that practically no one recognized it as one of Tracy’s lines from the picture.
In terms of publicity, Spencer Tracy generally did less to promote his movies than any star since Garbo—initially to cover his drinking, later because Kate herself had such an aversion to the press. (Her father disapproved of personal publicity of any kind, or anything else, for that matter, that smacked of “showing off.”) Gradually, Howard Strickling tightened access to the point where he was not talking to journalists at all. “They used to say, ‘He’s a prick and he doesn’t want to see anybody,’ ” Tracy explained. “They were partly right.”
The only promotional efforts he made over the spring of 1948 were in support of John Tracy Clinic, which had officially been in operation now for five years. He broke his radio embargo to appear on Louella Parsons’ ABC broadcast and made himself available for photos when Sophie Tucker turned over a $1,000 check to the clinic’s building fund. The premiere of Cass Timberlane netted another $10,000 for the fund, and it soon got so he was better known around the lot for the clinic than for the pictures he was making.
“If somebody approached him,” said June Caldwell, Eddie Mannix’s secretary, “and had a problem with a child in the family, or if anyone needed help from the clinic, he was very sympathetic to that and he would make arrangements … I know of incidences [where people who] were working around the studio went down to the set and waited until he got a chance to talk to them, and he’d say, ‘Certainly,’ and he would give them a name and he would be helpful.”
With the expansion of the clinic’s board to eighteen members it was no longer practical to hold meetings at the ranch. When meetings shifted to the Biltmore downtown, Tracy started looking for a graceful exit. “We’d have a dinner meeting,” Louise said. “One of the things that bothered him was that everybody had to pay for their own dinner. He thought that was absurd. He wouldn’t come to one and not pay for the whole dinner. He invited them and he said, ‘This is on me.’ He couldn’t see anybody else paying money for something that he would be involved in. I said, ‘They’re paying for their own.’ He said, ‘I know, but they shouldn’t have to do that.’ ”
Alathena Smith, the clinic’s staff psychologist, first came upon him one day by chance. He and John had pulled up in front of the main cottage in John’s station wagon, and it was the young man driving that first caught her notice, not his famous parent. “I was very attracted to him,” she said of John. “I observed his limping and I knew before he rounded the station wagon that this was a well-raised young man, taught to be polite.” Instantly, she could sense the gulf between father